Untangled
Caribbean Tales of Hope and Lament
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2023
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Publisher's Description
Untangled takes the reader on a swirling tour of some of the most beautiful places in the Caribbean but also of the region's gruesome history. The eye of love searches the landscape in the wake of colonialism and the grim traffic of bodies and souls across the Middle Passage. Evoking everything from birdcalls to colorful festivals, missionaries' blunders to tasty traditional feasts, Joy Rudder is intimately knowledgeable of her home, which spans the entire Caribbean. She voices heartbreaking questions that most do not venture to ask. But her pain is transformed into poetry, her outrage into prayer. She finds that Christ has preceded her and is very present in her multi-ethnic, multi-religious native Trinidad. Christ is also present in her adopted home, politically correct and trendy Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. She discovers love in unusual places, delights in friendships with strangers, and kneels to worship in a frat house bathroom. She muses on the grandeur of natural places she has been privileged to see in North America and the Caribbean, yet she unearths disturbing visions. In the end, she finds peace at the last, beyond her troubled quests, in the lived reality of hope.
Endorsements (4)
“You will find story time with Joy Rudder to be a riotous cornucopia of friends and flowers, birds and babies, tropical trees and Caribbean culinary arts, manta rays and armadillos, soursop and pomerac—all sparkling exuberantly off the page with a warmth and brilliance to rival the Caribbean waters that surround her beloved homeland. Though there’s also a solemn gravitas undergirding the poetic profusion of Rudder’s imagery, her stories simultaneously unscramble and interweave some of the most challenging issues of our lives and our times.”
“Untangled is a hybrid collection of creative nonfiction and poetry held together by a common theme: longing. In re-narrating her own rich Trinidadian history, Joy Rudder discloses the impact of colonizers’ unholy longings for mammon that ravished a land and a people—longings that prove tepid alongside the deeper human desire for the One called ‘Love,’ whose voice whispers through all things to animate and redeem. Rudder has the promise of the kingdom in her voice, both in its critique and in its lyrical hope.”
“Throughout Untangled, an evocative, episodic memoir told in wide-ranging stories, Joy Rudder deftly sorts out tangles of radiant hope and realistic lament as she takes us to places as distant as vibrant Caribbean shores and a frat house in British Columbia. In prose redolent with life, the author passionately probes the Divine Presence in the everyday. More than words remembered from a page, this book lingers with me as a contemplative lens through which I am better able to see grace.”
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